We Still Live Here (As Nutayunean)

WE STILL LIVE HERE is the inspiring story of the rebirth of a language and with it, a community. The Wampanoag lived in southeastern Massachusetts when the first English settlers came to America. Over the last hundred years, all but a few spoken words of their language had been lost. In 1994, Jessie Little-Doe began having dreams of familiar-looking people who were speaking a language she didn’t understand. She realized the language must be her ancestral tongue and began to research it. She enrolled at MIT to study linguistics and to reconstruct her lost language—something that had never been done before. Award-winning filmmaker Anne Makepeace beautifully interweaves archives and animations showing how, ironically, the language was preserved in state records and Bible translations. From these writings, the spoken language expanded, inspiring pride for the Wampanoag people, as well as a different way of connecting to the world and to themselves. - Betsy Cramer